Distributed strategy for communication between multiple robots during formation navigation task

Abstract

Swarm robotics involves the study of the behavior of a set of robots in carrying out collective tasks, such as alignment, navigation and formation. During cooperative tasks execution, the communication among robots can contribute to successfully performing tasks through an efficient messages exchange. This paper proposes a communication strategy for swarm robots, the so-called Double-Wave Swarm, aiming at alignment and navigation tasks. The Double-Wave Swarm is an improvement of a prior Wave Swarm communication approach that uses the concept of wave propagation for message exchange between neighbors. Double-Wave Swarm provides better communication network connectivity when compared to the former approach. Experiments with the robot simulator CoppeliaSim (V-REP) validate the proposed communication and highlight its efficiency and robustness while running alignment and navigation tasks. Also, the Double-Wave Swarm proved to be superior during swarm formation navigation into environments with obstacles in different scenarios if compared with Wave Swarm.